As is well known, a two-dimensional (2D) display is unable to present information about depth of field to viewer as the real world does. The reason why a person can discern depth of field (3D effect) is that the person's two eyes have positional deviation caused by the interocular distance between the two eyes. Two pictures having binocular parallax become a pair of 3D pictures which, after being merged based on human brain's visual sense, produce a three-dimensional effect.
3D display may be divided into glassless-type 3D display and glass-type 3D display. The main stream technology of glass-type 3D display comprises shutter glasses technology and pattern retarder technology, while the glassless-type 3D display technology mainly involves application of parallax barrier, lenticular lens barrier or the like. Among the barriers for glassless-type 3D display, the most mature one is the parallax barrier technology, while the LC barrier technology can be used to realize switching between 2D and 3D display.
A 3D display device can use a liquid crystal panel as the display unit; light exiting from the liquid crystal panel is polarized light, thus when an LC barrier is adopted to realize 3D display, only one polarizer is needed to achieve 3D display. However, in the 3D display device having a display panel emitting non-polarized light for display, such as an organic light emitting display (OLED), a plasma display panel (PDP), and a cathode ray tube (CRT), as the display unit, the emitted light is close to natural light, and therefore, when an LC barrier is adopted to realize 3D display, two polarizers are needed to achieve 3D display, which leads to severe light loss. The brightness in 3D display is not high.